


vel ama

by Island_of_Reil



Series: The Lighting of a Fire [2]
Category: The Goblin Emperor - Katherine Addison
Genre: Academia, Dogs, Environment, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Death, Implied/Referenced Drowning, Mentors, Politics, Post-Canon, Rivers, Worldbuilding, implied/referenced m/m at end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 13:13:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15292278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: Thara, happily installed in his new role, catches up with his old tutor.





	vel ama

**Author's Note:**

> I introduced Ametalo in [“Child of Ulis.”](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10441455) The title of this series comes from the ([highly dubious](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/education-is-not-the-filling-of-a-pail-but-the-lighting-of-a-fire-it-s-an-inspiring-quote-but-did-wb-yeats-say-it-1.1560192)) Yeats quote “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”

Steam rises above the little lacquered-wood table between them as she pours the tea. Summer has several days left to it yet and the weather is still quite pleasant in the main, but the early mornings have begun to wax cooler. When Thara lifts the tiny ceramic cup, the warmth of its smooth, round side feels good against his palm.

“I thank thee,” he says, smiling, because it is Ametalo and he still cannot believe that he will be able to take tea with her weekly. Most of Ashedro remains asleep at this hour but they two are early risers, she by nature and he by dint of his current duties.

She returns the smile. “How farest in thy new post, Osmichen Thara?”

He does not answer immediately, but sips and savors while studying his old tutor and her surroundings. The last few decades have, overall, been much kinder to her than to him. It is evidenced by the esoteric clutter of her professorial flat: a mélange of gifts from friends and colleagues, souvenirs from her recently ended sabbatical and from her other travels, and the books and maps of her field. It is also evidenced by the heavy golden key that dangles in the neckline of her gown, in her thick grey scholar’s braid, in the flaky little egg-and-herb pastries her maidservant has laid out for them, and in the quality of the tea. The leaves are rich and dark, grown in the lands south of Solunee-over-the-water, and they are surpassingly strong. On Thara’s tongue are pinpricks of flavors he has not tasted in years, not all of which he recalls the names of, and within his brain he can feel the muzziness clearing, gears turning, connections being forged.

At length he replies, “I rather like it, in sooth. It’s peaceful.”

“Much less exciting than Witnessing for the dead.”

“Much less sorrowful, too.”

Her eyes go soft, briefly, and then refocus. “Does the river call to thee, as that man did?”

“It does, though not as strongly. I could hear it without tutelage, but I had to be taught to understand it.”

Something flares in her eyes just then. “Does the Athamara know its own history, Thara? Csemaro? The Battle of Cairado? Even just the old ford a mile from here?”

Thara shakes his head and picks up a pastry. “It doesn’t have the mind of a man or woman, or even that of a beast. History is an abstract thing, and a river cannot abstract. Therefore it cannot communicate anything of which no trace persists in its waters, or in the stones beneath them, or in the life it sustains. It would not have retained any effluent from a village that disappeared hundreds let alone thousands of years ago, nor any blood that flowed into it during the Belthelemeise Wars.”

“What of, perhaps, a potsherd amid the stones?” she presses. “Or a spearhead or ring lost by a soldier?”

He swallows what he’s nibbled so far. “My compliments to thy cook, Ametalo. As to thy question: none of those things would trouble the river overly; it would perceive them as yet more stones, if irregular in shape. It does not and cannot understand what a ‘potsherd,’ ’spearhead,’ or ‘ring’ is.”

Ametalo’s ears drop a little. Thara suppresses a smile. “So... the river does not call to me in words. It does so in … impressions, if wilt, that register in a Witness’s mind. Suppose a fleet of rowboats were entering from Porcharn; the river will convey that its headwaters are disturbed by the oars and by the wakes of the boats. A silk factory upstream might be flouting the laws that dictate the disposal of its wastes, and the Athamara will give its Witness an impression of gumminess, tangles, or sickmaking smells. A person may have fallen in and drowned, and the river will cast out an impression of putrefaction and of fish and insects gathering at the source of the putrefaction.”

Though Ametalo has no professional use for this set of facts she is raptly attentive. “Is’t according to the direction of flow, or can the river communicate something to thee from downstream?”

“It depends. An a steamboat were coming up the Istandaärtha from Barizhan and bearing east onto the Athamara, I’d get no hint of it until it was within a few miles of Ashedro. But an a freighter ran aground at Cairado or even south of it and spilt many gallons of an industrial substance into either river, I’d sense it eventually. How soon is a fickle thing. It depends on the contaminant, the swiftness of the river, and the weather. Thy colleagues who study the properties of liquids might be able to explain in full it better than I could.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” she says, waving a hand lightly.

“That said, there’s a Witness vel ama for each of the other rivers — the Istandaärtha has two — and a Witness who listens to the headwaters and streams of the Osreialhalans. An something befouls the southern Istandaärtha, the Witness for that half of the river will learn of it before I do.”

“Do you all report such things to ... an overseer of Witnesses, perhaps? Scholars? Clergy? Officials of Edrehasivar’s government?”

“Speaking for myself alone…” Thara begins. His cup is empty; he sets it down to refill it, and when Ametalo leans forward to do it for him he gives her a glare of warning. She subsides back into her chair with silent laughter.

A note of laughter in his own voice, he continues, “I jot down notes throughout the day, even just ‘all quiet’ or the like. In the late afternoon I flesh them out into a complete report, and I leave it in the correspondence box in the Hall of Natural Sciences on my way to the baths and the dining hall. An the river told me something of import that day, I’d seek out Professor Nezhar” — Ametalo’s eyes register recognition and approval of her fellow scholar — “but most days are uneventful. My fellow Witnesses leave their reports either with a local university or with a governmental functionary who sends them to Nezhar by courier. Nezhar in turn compiles them into weekly and monthly reports. I know not whom he shares them with regularly, but presumably he’d seek an audience with his member of Parliament were the need to arise.”

“I’d imagine that the nobility and their silk factories upstream would pose a frequent reason to do so,” Ametalo says acerbically.

Thara raises the cup and gives her a crooked smile. _“That_ is yet another ongoing battle between Edrehasivar and the lords of Thu-Athamar.”

She arches her brows. “One would think the extirpation of the Tethimada would have provided a succinct lesson to them.”

“Oh, it did… for a while. But they had the entirety of the winter to recoup their sense of equilibrium. In the spring, Nezhar petitioned for and obtained an audience with His Serenity, in which he relayed how the silkmakers not only consume massive quantities of water but befoul yet more quantities of it. Edrehasivar was justifiably angered, and he began to challenge the Corazhas _and_ the House of Blood on the matter.” He sets the teacup down. “Of course, asking the nobility not to poison the waters of their own land was and is a terrible outrage.”

She barks out a laugh at the dryness with which he uttered the last sentence. “Of course.” There’s a hard look in her eyes now. Thara suspects she is thinking of his father, whom he hasn’t seen in years. He wasn’t thinking of the man specifically; the elder Celehar is, sad to say, not a remotely exceptional example of noble arrogance.

He does not wish bitterness to seep into this time the gods have given him to spend with her after so many years apart. He finishes his pastry and says mildly, “There is a fairly constant level of contaminants in the Athamara to begin with. I simply leave the reports for Nezhar, for him to do as he will with them. I do not send for him unless there is a drowning or other unfortunate event that can and must be addressed at once.”

Ametalo’s eyes cloud over again. “Hast had to deal with a drowning yet?”

Thara’s heart grows leaden in his chest. “Just once. It was … more than enough.”

It had been a michen, a boy of perhaps ten, and he had washed up within half a mile of Thara’s post. Thara had walked there, waded into the current, hefted the dead wet weight in his arms, and laid the boy out on the bank. He hadn’t intended to Witness for him, but the boy regarded him with glassy eyes the shade of mud in his bloated and colorless face and said, _Ulis has set me on his knee. Tell my ma she’s right, I should’ve stayed away from the river. And I’m sorry and I love her._

He passed on nothing but the last three words to the boy’s mother.

Ametalo does not press him for details, and when she moves to refill the cup he does not protest. They sip silently for a moment, each nibbling at a pastry, before she asks, “So … essentially, sitt’st on the bank all day with pen and paper to hand?”

His smile is genuine this time. “I do walk about within a range of a few miles, looking for other hints of anything amiss. But, yes, I spend much of the day sitting on the bank under a willow’s fronds. Or in one of the little shelters when the weather is foul or very cold or hot.”

“Dost not get bored? I’d be out of my mind in a day or less.”

“Clerical training equips one well to endure hours of tedium. I pray and meditate a great deal; in a meditative state I can actually hear the river’s voice more clearly. And, well… there’s the dog.”

Her brows shoot up. “The _dog?”_

“Yes. The dog. Every Witness vel ama for a force of nature such as a river is assigned a dog, to keep the Witness company and to serve as a guard. The dogs are trained not to interrupt the Witnesses’ work. The ones assigned to the Witnesses for rivers fish for their own meals, and when the rivers are frozen over they hunt small game. Mine sleeps outside my cabin if the weather permits, upon the hearth if it doesn’t. So he’s no trouble at all… for the most part.”

“Thou _art_ going to introduce me to him, art not?”

Thara laughs. “An truly _wantst_ to make the acquaintance of a creature that smells of mud, river-bloom, and wet dog.” Wryly, he adds, “In fairness, after a long summer’s day I can’t claim to smell that much better.”

“Art longing for the winter, then?” she asks archly.

“Dreading it, more like. But I’d still fain be on an icy riverbank than in an icy ulimeire. I can dress much more warmly… and the river and the dog are far better company than most clerics are.”

Ametalo snorts. “I don’t doubt it. They’re probably far better company than most academics are, too.”

He is amused, but not so much that he does not fall silent for a moment. Then hesitantly he says, “There’s someone else I’d like thee to meet.”

“Oh?”

Her eyes are bright once again, her ears erect. Thara is startled to find that he must lower his own eyes and that his face has become heated. He does not fear her judgment, not precisely; in sooth, he wonders if she knew he was marnis before he himself did. Too, he wonders if the same is true of her, though he has never heard her speak with a lover’s fondness of any woman _or_ any man. But he has never before casually confided an affair of the heart to another — it is not a luxury permitted to marnei — and he finds himself suddenly diffident and unsure.

She draws it from him with the same mix of enthusiasm and gentleness with which she used to elicit long essays from him on the nature of the moon and stars or on the history of the Ethuveraz. She delights in the details, and he warms to the telling of them. The topic, and their hour together, conclude with her insisting that she will have the two of them to dinner at the first opportunity and that she will brook no protest from Thara on the matter. The latter declaration makes his heart ache with memories, but it also makes him smile again.

“Sadly, I must bid thee goodbye for now,” he says before long, rising. “The Athamara calls.”

“In more than one sense. And I must begin to prepare for the day’s classes. Do take at least a few of these pastries with thee, please — no, I’ll hear no quarreling on that matter, either. Need’st the energy far more than I do.”

When they said farewell all those years ago, Thara caviled to throw his arms around her, reckoning it a boy’s gesture and not a man’s. But he is nearly four-and-thirty now, not sixteen, and so he pulls her into a tight embrace. She sniffles slightly, and he feels no shame at the misting of his own eyes.

Finally she holds him out at arm’s length, and she smiles. “Mine osmichen has done well,” she says huskily.

“His tutor has served him well,” Thara replies. “Next week, then?”

“Of course. A peaceful day to thee — and do thy best to keep the sun off thy face and ears.”

“I’ll try,” he promises. For that’s all she’s ever asked of him: that he try.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote [a few paragraphs about the dog](https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/279534.html?thread=1576559342#cmt1576559342) last fall. I do intend to write more.


End file.
